If we go back to Beckett, or to various bits by Thomas Bernhard, these examples seem to represent an exception. One wants to find the new. And, in finding it, do everything one can to fight for it. There was a time when I was far more bellicose than I am now. I loved getting on panels and saying, ‘Well, piss on you all: if you haven’t read a Raymond Carver story, you haven’t read the best thing in short fiction’. They’d say, ‘Raymond who? Raymond what?’ Now, to be sure, I wrote those stories. But they dismissed Carver. They only came around to him when he was officially approved, by the New York Times and so on. No one’s approving Jason Schwartz, I can assure you. And we know why. A Carver story is teachable. You can put it in front of a class of high school kids, and they’ll get it. Not so with Schwartz. He presents certain problems. These arise doubtless out of his being smarter, and being concerned with telling the truth – his truth, uniquely.

I want people who can make magic. That’s what the job at hand is. To take the elements of the language, to take these tarnished and exhausted entities, and to cause them to move in a way they’ve never moved otherwise. To imbue them with movement through the particular imposition of one’s will, one’s desire. To say, ‘Can I make it do that? Can I make it do that?’ When I’m reading, I want to be swept away; I want to feel that I have seen what I would otherwise never have seen. I want to be made to say, ‘I must change my life’. The New Yorker recently ran a really vicious piece about my classes, distorting my idea of ‘seduction’. Needless to say, I wasn’t talking about sex. What I meant was that art should lead people away from being-in-the-world by conventional means.

3:AM Stuff

Buzzwords

Gary Gutting, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has died. Professor Gutting worked on philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, contemporary French philosophy, and contemporary analytic philosophy. He was well-known for his substantial work in public philosophy, authoring several columns and conducting a number of interviews with philosophers for The Stone feature in The New York […]

Subsequent to LIVEWIRE, where I reported on the local NYC underground performance art scene, now as Yannanda The One That Speaks With The Stars, I will decipher the Universe one shadowy layer at a time! @JanaAstanov New Moon/Solar Eclipse in 15º Capricorn: 5, 6 January 2019 The Great Mother, personified by the Moon, is […]

Fiction inspired by Pete Shelley and Buzzcocks, Love Bites is a collection of solicited and unsolicited work published online and offline at Dostoyevsky Wannabe and 3:AM Magazine. In the first part, the editors approched a range of writers and asked them to respond to particular songs by Buzzcocks and Pete Shelley with a work of […]